SOURCE: “A Community of Women: Surviving Marriage in the Wilderness,” in Portraits of Marriage in Literature, Western Illinois University, 1984, pp. 141–49.

In the excerpt below, Aarons stresses that American pioneer women needed the support of a larger female community in order to withstand the isolation of pioneer life.

American fiction written by women during the years surrounding the turn of the century illustrates the mounting tension between the rigid social structures of patriarchal conventions and the women who stood as pioneers in the often oppressive wilderness. The women protagonists in this corpus of fiction characteristically are portrayed as immigrants who find themselves isolated on the prairies, the plains, the remote countrysides, in a constant struggle with loneliness and hardship. More often than not, these protagonists are married, a convention only broken by the stigma of spinsterhood or the death of a spouse. And the kinds of matrimonial conventions illustrated...